Stage 5 Changing Places

"For the first time in human history, more of the world’s 6.8 billion people live in cities than in rural areas. That is an incredible demographic and geographic shift since 1950 when only 30 percent of the world’s 2.5 billion inhabitants lived in urban environments.

The world’s largest cities, particularly in developing countries, are growing at phenomenal rates. As a growing landless class is attracted by urban opportunities, meager as they might be, these cities’ populations are ballooning to incredible numbers.

A May 2010 Christian Science Monitor article on “megacities” predicted that by 2050, almost 70 percent of the world’s estimated 10 billion people—more than the number of people living today—will reside in urban areas. The social, economic and environmental problems associated with a predominantly urbanized population are considerably different from those of the mostly rural world population of the past."

Black gold has brought big-money jobs and severe growing pains to once-sleepy North Dakota towns.

A remarkable transformation is underway in western North Dakota, where an oil boom is changing the state's fortunes and leaving once-sleepy towns bursting at the seams. In a series of stories, NPR is exploring the economic, social and environmental demands of this modern-day gold rush.

Students prepare a news report that highlights problems facing coastal communities and how climate change might affect coastal populations.

Focusing on total population—rather than the number of people actually residing in urban areas—obscures the extent of China's urbanization challenge.

Charles Montgomery's new book finds the intersection of urban policy and well-being.

The German city is planning a green network that will cover 40% of the city area, contributing to resilience and allowing biking, swimming and nature watching in the city

The European commercial hub promotes bicycling as the main mode of transportation, and plans to build a network around bikes and pedestrians, linking car-free roads to parks and playgrounds, from the city centre to the suburbs.

Welcome to Hamburg, an environmental pioneer whose planned green network will cover 40% of the city's area. "It will connect parks, recreational areas, playgrounds, gardens and cemeteries through green paths", says Angelika Fritsch, a spokeswoman for the city's department of urban planning and the environment. "Other cities, including London, have green rings, but the green network will be unique in covering an area from the outskirts to the city centre. In 15 to 20 years you'll be able to explore the city exclusively on bike and foot."

Three ambitious architectural firms have set out on a task to re-develop New Orleans with a 30-million-square-foot triangular architectural complex on the Mississippi riverfront. Dubbed NOAH, or New Orleans Archology Habitat, the hurricane-proof complex will carry 20,000 residential units, three hotels, 1 million square feet of commercial space and enough space for cultural facilities and offices.

The complex will feature green systems, including solar panels, wind turbines, water turbines, fresh water recovery systems and a passive solar glazing system. While still in the planning phases, the project is an example of how architecture should be capable of generating enough power to fuel more than it consumes. 

Here is an infographic for China’s Urbanisation produced by the EU-funded Dragon-STAR project. China’s urbanisation over the past three decades is a massive phenomenon of scale and speed. In the 19...

The Chinese government plans to move 250 million people from farms to cities over the next 12 to 15 years.

Architecture firm Snøhetta has concluded the first phase of a major overhaul of New York's Times Square, continuing the initiative started in 2009 to pedestrianise large sections of the popular tourist destination.

The $55 million reconstruction project is the largest redesign of the square in decades and encompasses the transformation of five public plazas between 42nd and 47th Streets, which will be entirely reconstructed to remove any traces that vehicular traffic once ran through the square along the Broadway...

Densely populated neighborhoods, commercial district city squares and multiple public transit lines all span the city of Cambridge, Mass., creating an environment ideal for walking.

The most recent Census counts estimate nearly a quarter of the city’s residents walk to work, far more than any other larger U.S. city.

Many localities across the country are continuing to push policies and planning initiatives aimed at making communities more walkable. Recent census figures depict a wide variation in commuting habits among the nation’s urban centers, showing some have done much more than others.

Nationally, only a small fraction of people primarily walk to work – the measure the Census Bureau estimates in its annual American Communities Survey. In a select group of cities, though, recent data illustrates the extent to which walking has emerged as an everyday means of commuting.

In places like Istanbul and Mexico City, BRT is cleaning the air and saving commute time.

You want good civic tech ideas? The people have good civic tech ideas.

Code for America and Mindmixer have been running Ideation Nation--an online brainstorm to find tech fixes for cities--since the beginning of the month. People have posted 300 ideas so far.

"We're going to make the [best] 25 available to Code for America's 3,000 volunteer designers and hackers," says Nick Bowden, Mindmixer's CEO. "They want to build stuff for communities." You can submit your own idea till October 31. The overall winner gets prize money, and support to develop the idea.

Visit the link for some of the favorites so far, including customizable mobile apps to phone-charging street furniture.

"The French have a wonderful word—flâneur—for someone who seeks to explore and understand the nature of a city’s landscape, usually by taking spontaneous adventures amidst the ebb and flow of life going on around them. In this week’s theme we invite you to lose yourself reading about the flâneur-esque adventures of Maptia’s streetwise connoisseurs and explore a myriad of cities through their eyes."

Cities across the globe are witnessing an increasing frequency of extreme weather events. This combined with population growth and urbanization means it is more crucial than ever that the systems that keep our cities functioning are resilient to the complex, uncertain and constantly changing risks that face them.

These four infographics are taken from the new report Toolkit for Resilient Cities, produced by Siemens, Arup and Regional Plan Association (RPA), and feature urban resilience from the perspective of the electricity grid, water systems, buildings and transport.